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The further we went, the more favela-like our surroundings became, until we stopped outside a large, solid set of gates, beyond which lay a huge cave, ‘furnished’ with tens of thousands of human skulls. The poor of Naples had been placing their dead here for centuries, and the sandy earth on which I was treading was but a thin covering over millions more skeletons. A couple of hundred years ago, a flood surged through the place and took the bones with it into the centre of town. The aesthetically pleasing arrangements dated from then: when a priest, clearly a decorator manqué, had the bones collected and brought back to brighten the place up. He created a very fetching altar of shin bones and skulls, and a truly dramatic Golgotha of skulls.

This cave was viewed as a place of purgatory on earth, and people would come and pray here for the dead to be released into paradise. However, this being Naples, they wanted something in return: lottery numbers, fecundity, matrimony or just good ol’ money. If a skull gave good results, they built a little house for it — a sort of architecturally aware hutch, often in marble and sometimes with a little cushion. If they wanted to compound the effect, they would add more skulls, often putting locks on the houses to stop others from filching a particularly effective skull. Naples is a city where sophistication coexists with almost medieval superstition — for instance, the failure, according to legend, of the blood of St. Gennaro to liquefy is still regarded as a portent of evil.

In short, it is a culturally rich and engrossing city where male elegance is a strong component — one that, thanks to the efforts of Mariano, will be immortalised in a museum. The earliest garments in the collection date from the early years of the 19th century and have the hallmarks of Neapolitan tailoring that are still seen today. Of course, given that the Rubinacci business was not founded until the 1930s, these items predate his enterprise, but he felt it was important to reference the work of earlier generations; in this, he was inspired by the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva, where pre-Patek masterpieces are exhibited as well as the firm’s own chefs d’oeuvre. And, just as Patek have made watches for royalty, so has Rubinacci made clothes for crowned heads, and the museum includes a particularly snazzy overcoat made for the last king of Italy, who permitted Mariano’s father to use the royal cipher.

Tag: Pocket Square

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